Sophie tilted her head in the dragon equivalent of a shrug. “Konifer will honor his duties with respect to Mobious same as he would with any dTelfur.” She put a slight emphasis on the last word. “But he’s not going to go out of his way to be nice to him.”
“Sophie. Konifer doesn’t go out of his way to be nice to anyone.”
“He used to be nicer. He was a fun kid. He’s not really as bad as he seems, Hardt.”
“So you keep telling me and I promise I will keep that in mind if ever I happen to run in to him again.”
“And tell Mobious that too.”
At the thrilling sound of his name, Mobious turned back towards Sophie. He splashed water at her face and screamed, “Wakey wakey!”
“Shush, Mobi.” Hardt slipped back into the water and swam over to toss the giggling infant in the air. “If you weren’t so keen on talking a blue streak you could exercise these gills of yours.”
And so Hardt didn’t tell anyone about the little bitty lake which wasn’t there before. And at Sophie’s insistence he never let anyone badmouth Konifer in Mobious’ presence including himself.
Sophie took Deg down the river again where he reassured her that as the vizet grew older and learned that those sort of things weren’t possible, he’d stop doing them. It was cold comfort to the dtur so she minimized her independent ventures, hunting only for what she and her small family absolutely needed, in order that she could spend the majority of her time with one eye on Mobious. Just in case.
The years went on and the sheddings got easier and if Mobious made any unintentional requests of Nature, neither Sophie nor Hardt noticed.
Nine
∞
With Mobious securely seated in front of Hardt on her shoulders, Sophie took a short running start and leaped into the chilly evening air. The sun wasn’t yet below the horizon but the moon was already up and nearly as high as the faintly visible Aeschent. Sophie ascended in lazy circles, waiting for Nahni to catch up.
“You need to teach me how you ascend so quickly out of such tightly forested spaces, Sophie.”
“First lesson; never take off second.”
She demonstrated her point by quickly coasting over to position herself directly above the young dragon and then beating her wings against the wind. The resulting downdraft sent Nahni tumbling down nearly into the treetops. But she caught the current just in time and soared off into the setting sun beneath them. Then she circled up and far out, closing distance above Sophie. Hardt, watching her prancing about showing off her hard earned flying skills, noticed that the baby fur on the girl’s stomach was getting thicker and darker and he thought he noticed the slightest of mammary development there as well.
Finally, he thought, some visible sign of aging among his friends. The children’s bodies changed, but so slowly that he barely noticed any of them growing. Mobious was just approaching the height Getek’s son Ker had been when Hardt left Stray despite having fifteen full fourseasons, almost four sheddings, compared to Ker’s three. Mobious seemed to have a much stronger grasp of what was going on around him than Ker had ever had, but he was unable to express himself as clearly.
Mobious could pronounce many of the dTur words other telfs found impossible just as Nahni could speak more telfish words than other dTur and the two were also Hardt’s finest pupils in the study of lander language so the two of them used language in a whole different way from anyone else in the village. Deg had precipitated their multi-lingual conversations by encouraging Nahni to tutor Mobious in dtur sounds with a gentle reminder of how many dTelfur had been recruited to teach her flight. Still, with anyone but Nahni, Mobious much preferred to rattle off lots of fun sounding words rather than finding the ones that best suited his intentions.
Today he wasn’t talking at all. Nahni had told him they were going to look at the places Hardt used to live and the kid had his eyes pinned to the ground. He was leaning so far over Sophie’s shoulder that Hardt was becoming concerned the little dTelfur didn’t realize that he couldn’t fly as well.
They were going to visit Stray and Hardt too was excited. So excited he could barely speak. He wasn’t sure he’d even be able to find it but the quartet had planned for the trip to take a fortnight at least, so he had time. They’d spent last night and most of today at the stone hut he’d wintered in the year he’d hiked from Stray to the village. Sophie had hidden it under woven branches in the usual dTelfur way but the trees and bushes had grown up over the past eighteen years and once they picked through to it, they saw that the cottage had broken down.
Some other passing travelers had made basic repairs some seasons past and the overhanging leaves provided as good a roof as could be wanted for a night.
After some talk of lander architecture, they’d decided to nap through the day and start off in the evening for the recently completed castle which Nahni and Sophie had been watching since the basements were first dug. The dark night would make the dtur less visible to the skittish landers as they examined the architecture. A newer castle had begun construction further south but those landers were more frightened of dragons and hadn’t even taken any stone from the new dragonbed Nahni and Sophie had dug out in a convenient location for them. They’d visit that one later in the trip, when the first moon was dark and the far moon invisible.
Hardt was wearing the clothes he’d left Stray with. They didn’t fit him so well as they had but he made no alterations for fear he wouldn’t remember how lander clothes were made. He’d sewn a small lander hunting outfit for Mobious because though he didn’t know how to spin lander style cloth, he’d learned tanning early and remembered working with Vyck like it was yesterday rather than half a lifetime ago. Mobious had broken in the outfit by playing and swimming in it at home every night. Sophie and Hardt didn’t let him wear it to the village for fear someone would suspect their plans.
The land rushed quickly by beneath them. Mostly trees and plains and wild animals but they did spook one herd of bison and they sited a farm north of their flight path and overflew a decent sized village with intricate walkways and a huge walled gaming yard.
Nahni wanted to stop and ask questions about it, but Hardt admitted that neither Pace, the village where he’d been born and barely remembered at all, nor Stray had been built so intricately and he had no idea how the walkways had been built or why the buildings were arranged in a spiral so Sophie declared that they would fly on to the castle and return to examine the spiral shale afterwards.
They overflew the castle and circled out a ways in case there were outlying shales like the ones surrounding the lander castles of Kahago and Weary. There was clearly no castleshale like Kahago’s Voferen, but they couldn’t tell if the trees were hiding some smaller encampments of “outlanders” as Nahni called them, referring to the dTelfur who chose to live outside the village.
After a few passes they landed in the closest clearing they could find. The two dtur hunkered down and kept Mobious sheltered between them while Hardt took off to scout the area for lander camps. Several hours later he returned to find Mobious snuggled up in a nook made by the warm curves of Sophie’s muzzle lying sideways on her great feet and Nahni’s great head laying against the far side of Sophie’s right foot. Mobious slept as freely as if he were in his own bower, spread out on the huge dtur foot with his legs tossed out at broken angles and an arm flung over to Nahni, his hand gripping the soft fur of her ear flap.
Hardt watched them for a few moments, trailing a hand along the low branches of the trees and crunching through the groundfall, humming softly. Not one of the three stirred a muscle. Most any lander seeing the dragons by themselves would quickly back off in fear, but if they saw a child with the monsters, Mobious would find himself caught in a battle of best intentions.
Both dtur woke when he climbed up over their muzzles to recover the kid. Sophie because he stepped on her nostril and Nahni because the cranky Mobious didn’t want to let go of her ear. Both woke with the instant knowledge that they�
��d done something wrong but Sophie was quicker than Nahni to figure out it was that they’d let Hardt sneak up on them. She covered her embarrassment by questioning Hardt a bit too enthusiastically about what he’d discovered.
“Well, I found no outlanders. There is evidence of a recent picnic or something up north of the wall but we should be okay here. The archway entrance to the castle is open, but I didn’t want risk running into a sentry so I didn’t check it out. The walls are built with a more intricate arrangement of stone than anything I’ve ever built. But I can show you how they cut the stone.”
Nahni yawned again, “I still don’t understand why they build with stone.”
“It’s because they’re afraid of us. They think we spit fire.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about that, Sophie, and I don’t think that’s the whole reason. The largest roof, after all, is built out of wood. And most of this place doesn’t even have a roof.”
“So everyone hides in the multi-story structure when we attack.”
Sophie was thinking of the time about a hundred sheddings ago when she and dTserra had tried to meet some people at the castleshale Hardt had identified as Voferen Kahago. The people had all run screaming for the castle. That one had been entirely covered with stone.
“Sophie, I know it hurts you that my people are so afraid of you, but really they don’t live in constant fear. I think this building style came with us from over the water.”
Nahni pitched in, trying to sooth Sophie and agree with Hardt at the same time. “You certainly don’t build many of these. And most of the small bowers are built of wood.”
“They’re called houses. Or cottages or huts or halls. Depends on the size. Families live in them. A couple parents usually and their children and sometimes the childrens’ children as well.”
Nahni, who still secretly believed that Akai was her dam and was surreptitiously interviewing male dragons to find her sire, had happily grasped the concept of family faster than any other dTelfur in the lessons. Most dTelfur, including Sophie, found the concept lonely but Nahni had confessed to Hardt that though she wouldn’t want to grow up anywhere but the nursery, she felt badly for those hatchlings who weren’t atchs or chosen as favorites by any adults. Hardt had pointed out that she herself was one of those. But she had demurred, “I’m different. I picked out my own favorites. If hatchlings had parents though, then you’d automatically be a favorite.”
“Ah,” Hardt was thrown by that assumption. Though it was a logical one, his own upbringing belied it. “It doesn’t always work that way. I don’t know my sire and as for my dam, I only know her name, Nadi. My aunt’s parents didn’t particularly care for Vyck either. Although in Stray I knew the Mytrees who were pretty much a nursery all by themselves. They lived in a small group of huts and cottages they called their compound.”
Here in the forest around the new castle, Nahni still couldn’t grasp the idea of individual homes. “But they’re awfully well built for private bowers. They can’t all be outlanders.”
“Amongst the landers, the majority live in private homes and the minority in large population dwellings like this castle.”
“It’s a small castle.” Sophie pointed out.
“What? Compared to the other two?”
“Three, the one down south looks like it’s going to be huge.”
“Huge? Even to a dragon?”
“Several Degs could fit in the area they’ve shaved of trees.” Nahni pointed out.
“That’s multiply true of Voferen Kahago but not all of that space is filled with castle.”
Nahni shook her head, correcting his logic. “But you said they didn’t chop trees down to build that one. You said it was already loosely forested.”
“That’s true.” Sophie added. “And they didn’t cut down any trees for this one or for Weary, the eastern castle except for a few they used for the building.”
“Sophie if you’ve been watching us build since we arrived on the continent, you should know a heck of a lot more than I do about lander architecture.”
“But I don’t understand why you build so elaborately?”
“Because we build for our children.” He hunkered down and let bored little Mobious crash into his arms. “You build knowing you’re going to be around to keep repairing and changing your space for the next five hundred years or so. We don’t even get a hundred each. So we build with more care because we want our children to live better than we do. We don’t want them to have to quarry rock and carve lumber or sleep out in bad weather in fear of wild animals and strangers.”
“And us.”
“Without you, Sophie, the rock quarrying would be an even more unpleasant task. They just don’t know it yet.”
“But you’re going to tell them?”
“Sure, tomorrow I’ll just walk in there with Mobious and tell them.”
“The dragons are harmless, you know.”
The weaver Hardt had found working on a massive loom outside the castle walls smacked Mobious’ hand with her shuttlecock when he reached out to touch the golden threads mixed in the red and orange on the half-finished tapestry.
“And they don’t actually breath fire.”
She didn’t even look up to answer him. “All the dragons I’ve seen breathe fire.”
“Have you ever seen a dragon?”
“Plenty.”
“And they all breathed fire?”
“Yes.”
“Right there in front of you?”
“Look, dragons breathe fire. Everyone knows it.”
“How do they know? Have you ever spoken to a dragon?”
“No. But you’re gonna tell me you have.”
“Sure, all the time. I’m a dTelfur.”
“Yeah, and I’m Queen Frell.”
“Laurel, you mean.”
“Laurel died thirty seasons ago.”
Hardt did the math, more slowly than when he was used to the lander style of counting the years. Seven sheddings and two seasons ago. So the kimoet’s summons, currently tucked in his old backsac, was invalidated. And the little girl Getek had sent his greetings to was now the Queen. Hardt wondered absently if he cared enough to ask who had been chosen as partner.
“Now would you take your kid’s grubby hands elsewhere, dTelfur? I’ve got a deadline to make.”
No matter what he wanted to know he decided not to ask this woman. “Sure thing. Thanks for the update. That fire sure is pretty even if it isn’t truthful.”
He took Mobious’ hand and followed the boy who couldn’t get away from the unpleasant woman fast enough. Passing into the castle unmolested, they found it much like a small village with a roof over it and walls around it. To their right was a small double door entranceway into the multistory, stone-roofed section of the castle. Off to the left was a small farm. Directly ahead, between them and the rooftops they could see stood a stone wall just taller than Hardt.
It was early yet and there was little traffic in the atrium. Hardt was uncertain where they should go. Mobious, however, smelled food and took off towards the farm. Hardt followed. The food smell turned out to be a patch of overripe pumpkins which a lone man was turning over into the dirt. He paused in his work to smile at Hardt’s small and fearless friend, wiped the sweat from his balding head and finished crushing the last few bits of mushy pumpkin and vine into the rich soil with his hoe. The man, easily as tall as Hardt with only a halo of thinning brown hair along the back of his head, looked to have about forty frseason with most of it spent outdoors with his head down over his work. The back of his neck was a deep uniform brown, almost as dark as Mobious’ skin, while his several chins were stained with wrinkles of white. He was thinly built with muscled forearms and a developing paunch which he hid under a leather vest he picked up from the ground and slipped into before taking his hoe over to a small tool shed standing between his newly tilled patch and a field of vine covered trellises.
Wiping his hands on his already grubby pants the m
an turned back to Mobious, who was still staring with grave disappointment at the pumpkinless patch, and put out a hand. “Good morning, sir. My name is Mowden.”
Proudly, the little dTelfur shot out his hand and held it firmly up against the back of Mowden’s flat hand as he’d practiced. “My name is Mobious.”
The accent sounded suddenly too out of place to Hardt’s ear, hearing it for the first time against an actual lander. Other than himself.
But Mowden only raised his eyes slightly and nodded. “A pleasure to meet you Mobious.”
“And I’m Hardt.” He stepped nervously forward with a hand out, over the boy. “His guardian.”
Mobious tilted his head back, looking up at Hardt. He wanted to ask what that word meant but his atchs had a quieting hand on his shoulder.
Mowden met Hardt’s downfacing palm with his own. “You don’t share his accent. So he’s a Wester and you’re not?”
“I live in the west now.”
“Ah, present tense. So you’re not looking to settle here in Forte.”
“No. Just passing through. Thought we’d stop by and see if you had a public house.”
Mowden wiped his hands on his pants again and knelt down by Mobious. “Well, as a matter of fact, we don’t. But if you’re looking to breakfast on pumpkin,” Mobious nodded vigorously at the stranger, “well my bond has a batch of the finest pumpkin cakes you could want just waiting for me at home.”
Mobious walked hand in hand with the farmer as they sauntered back into the central, wooden-roofed section of the castle and through an arch in the inner stone wall to what looked like a small shale. Some of the cottages had no roof at all and some had walls that were even falling apart. There was more activity on this side of the stone wall and the three made progress slowly as Mowden stopped to talk with everybody they met. When they finally reached the cottage where Mowden lived Mobious was in the lead. He’d smelled the pumpkin cakes and led the lander man straight to his own front door.
Mowden’s bond was a short, heavyset, blond woman with huge ears. Her hair was mostly pulled back by a hastily tied headband which didn’t go any way towards disguising the size of the appendages on the sides of her head. She was wearing a dun-colored bib apron which had more pockets per square inch than any garment Hardt had ever imagined. A shirt was tossed over her shoulder with thread and needle dangling from it and swinging wildly about with her every move and her hands held three shoes, a whisk, and a whistle pipe with a wooden carpenters’ square hanging from her elbow.
Hardt's Tale: A Mobious' Quest Novel Page 20